Monthly Archives: April 2010

This is for those who may want to load a video onto their iPad with iTunes that isn't in the correct format. I needed to do this because I was trying to put an iTunes University video on my iPad a couple days ago and iTunes complained that it wasn't in the correct format for the iPad. I'm not sure exactly how that could be but I decided to take the opportunity to see if I could use HandBrake to easily convert it to an iPad friendly format. There is currently no pre-loaded iPad configuration for HandBrake like there is for the iPhone and iPod Touch so I created a few profiles that can easily be imported into HandBrake to output different sizes for the iPad:

Note that when you import videos using iTunes the iPad puts them in their own Videos app unlike the iPhone where they show up under the iPod app. You will want to find the Videos icon if you don't already know where it is:

After verifying that the above 4×3 version worked for the iTunes University video I went about testing it on a couple other video formats. I tested the Big Buck Bunny video that I also used for my post on iPad video streaming in both 640×360 and 1024×576 output formats. Both resolutions looked great. I also tried converting a DVD. If you decide to convert a DVD you will probably want to turn on de-interlacing in HandBrake. You do that by first selecting the "Picture Settings" option:

Then the filters tab and then select the type of de-interlace you want (fast, slow, slowest):

If you want to use FFMpeg to do all this you can. The following is a slightly modified version of the streaming command I'm using that will output a high bitrate version of the input video:

Here is a demo of the iPad streaming video created with the segmenter (I tried to show the progressive upgrade happening but it happens very quickly since the iPad is on WIFI, I also show that you can scrub without any issues and if you look in the background you can see the server log displaying entries as the segments are downloaded):

If you want to view the demo yourself I've created a demo for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Note that those are two links, one for the iPad version and one for the iPhone/iPod Touch version. The main difference is the size of the video.

I used the open source video Big Buck Bunny (the 1920×1080 ogg version) for the above demos.

If you are interested in more details on what changed read on or skip to the bottom if you want to see what I'll be working towards in future versions of the segmenter.

About Me

I am Carson McDonald a software engineer and this blog is a small slice of what I do every day. I started developing software in 1989 and since then have work with a wide range of languages and systems.